Hey
We are 25 engineers building machines for the graphic industry. Multiple people are working on the same projects at the same time, and we have build up an archive of 75.000 parts, assemblies and drawings. We havent been using any PDM system so far, but have a set of rules implementet to prevent overwriting existing parts/assemblies, so we take out a new number and copy the part and then makes changes to that "new" part. This way we have been able to work with out revisions.
We do however see the potential in using a PDM system, and have been looking at Conisio or PDM Works Enterprise as they renamed it, after SW bought it.
We would look at it as an investment, and therefor we need some sort of plan on how to save the money over time, by the functions within the program. The parametres we have that are meassure-able are loadtimes and the cost of making a new number in our system, which also has a cost.
Loadtimes: The main reason for wanting PDM is that we want to reduce loadtimes on our large assemblies, we have tried everything else, but it seems that SW have no intensions of making their program work for companies that works as ours, without PDM. To me is seems like a hustle... But I cant do anything about it. With PDMW Enterprise the loading into SW should be done locally (I was told it copies the files needed from the vault onto the local machine and then opens them from there). Which should easily cut our load times in half (we have loadtimes between 20 and 30 minutes on our larges assemblies - just ordered a 64-bit to get 8 gb of ram to actually be able to open the larger ones).
So what I am asking from all of you is to post your expiriences with Conisio/PDMW Enterprise, the pros and cons. Since I will be needing to put up a list of requirements for our VAR to be sure we will get a working system and not using a huge amount of money afterwards on consulting hours to make it work just because we didnt define it from the start.